How to use Google Flights

Flexibility Is KEY!

When booking travel, most people have their dates and locations nailed down before they search for flight and hotel bookings. Travel hacking has completely changed the way I plan for and book travel. Instead of starting with dates and places in mind, I’ll try to find where the best deals are and then plan my travel around that. Flexibility is key when playing this points and miles game. Also, as a general rule of thumb, I try to book 1-3 months in advance for domestic flights and 4-12 months in advance for international flights.

So how do I search for deals? Enter Google Flights. It’s one of my absolute favorite travel hacking tools. In fact, it’s usually where I start whenever I’m planning a trip because it’s so easy to explore different destinations and compare airline prices.

How To Use Google Flights

Visit Google Flights and click “Explore” on the left side of the screen.
Choose “One way” from the drop-down menu (I usually search one-way vs. round-trip because I prefer to have more flexibility – I may or may not want to fly to and from the same city).
From the drop-down menu, choose how many passengers and which class (economy, business, first, etc.).
Enter your departure destination – you can enter up to 5 locations, so you can compare other airports.
Enter your arrival destination – you can even leave this blank or type in an entire continent!
Enter either specific dates or flexible dates.
You can also add filters like how many stops, flight duration, which airlines you’d like to search, etc.
Click “Done.” The map on the right will then populate and you can click and drag around the screen to explore destinations all over the world!

You can also scroll through the calendar and see airfare prices for every single day for the next 6 months. This is especially useful when you’re a bit more flexible with your travel dates – you can clearly see which days will be cheaper to book.

As you can see from this quick search, it’s much cheaper to fly into Paris than Prague. So with that info, you can strategize the best way to get across the pond. Because the train system in Europe is so vast, efficient, and affordable, you can opt to fly into Paris (and save a few thousand dollars on airfare), and then take a train to pretty much anywhere in Europe for a whole lot less. Isn’t that super cool?!

But wait… there’s more! You can track flight routes and set email alerts if the prices go down!